Portable DLNA Media Server with a Raspberry Pi

I wanted to configure a Raspberry Pi as a portable Media Server, to take with us and allow the kids to watch movies from their own portable devices.

One of the main reason to use a Raspberry Pi is the fact that these devices are so small and portable. However, if you want to be able to take one with you, you have to be able to connect to it when you are on the go.

For that, you can enable your device to act as a Wireless Access Point.

Step 1 - Configure the Raspberry Pi to act as a WiFi Access point

Unfortunately, using the Edimax EW-7811Un wireless adapter to work on my Raspberry Pi wasn't as easy as it should have been. While this Realtek RTL8188CUS chipset based adapter works right out of the box when you use it to connect to wireless networks, the default hostapd always displayed the following error:

$ sudo hostapd /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf

Configuration file: /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf
nl80211: 'nl80211' generic netlink not found
Failed to initialize driver 'nl80211'
rmdir[ctrl_interface]: No such file or directory

In order to make hostapd work with the Edimax WiFi Realtek RTL8188 adapter work as a Wireless access point with a Raspberry Pi, follow this post:

MiniDLNA is a lightweight media server designed to support the DLNA and UPnP protocols. This works pretty nicely with almost any device you may want to consume media content on and it's so lightweight it's an ideal match for the Pi.

So, let's get started. First, run a full update and then install the minidlna package.

# apt-get update
# apt-get upgrade
# apt-get install minidlna

Once installed, we'll go ahead and edit the configuration file as follows.